As my book club briefly discussed Dan Brown books, the grocery store thriller critiques, the literature snobbery that presumes books have to be “difficult” in order to qualify as “good”, and the value of an “easy” read, I remembered one of the most confusing “endorsements” I’d ever ever heard for a book. (That’s a lot of air quotes.)
“You have to read ‘Twilight’!” a coworker enthused ages ago. “They’re sooo easy!”
“Okay,” I responded. “Easy? But are they good?” She never actually said that she enjoyed any of them, she just seemed proud to have read some books to completion. Any books.
Great reads don’t have to be Herculean efforts. Unless the material is important to you or your studies or your work, you shouldn’t bother with a book you have to force yourself through. Nor should you read any books just to say you have. Whether we learn or grow from a book, at the very least we should enjoy them. The ISBN organization estimates that 43 million unique, individual books exist. Life is way too short to read anything that doesn’t capture you.
As Mary Oliver tells us,
Let the soft animal of your body
Love what it loves
Recurring main character Robert Langdon regularly saves humanity. But reading Dan Brown books will not. They will not inform UN policy decisions or eradicate poverty. Nor do they have to. Just read what you love.
I’ve read every book Dan Brown’s ever written. I’ve only hated one.
On a scale of Meh to Why Isn’t This Required Reading, “Origin” is definitely a Where’s The Gas Leak?
This trying-to-run-in-a-dream lethargy desperately tries to be fast-paced. It reads like someone kidnapped Dan Brown and only had 24 hours to write a Dan Brown-esque novel using only his equally adored and maligned formula, or humanity will irrevocably find itself … without a new Dan Brown novel. Like Lucille Bluth, it is deliberately withholding, but it’s unclear what Brown actually intended to deliver this time.
It plods along so slowly I started to believe in the possibility of a rip in time, that I could emerge through a shadowy portal and materialize, all my particles intact, in a Costco in California last year. There, I would shake my uncle by the casual polo and implore him not to buy this book, not the hardcover, and not to loan it to my mom. But the truth is, I would’ve found my way to it no matter what. Because I loved everything that came before it, tropes and all. And I will most likely continue to read any novel he writes.
This time our smarter-than-thou protagonist, Professor Robert Langdon, is called upon once again in a race against time to save humanity from yet another impending global crisis. The clock is ticking, and the consequences, if he fails, are catastrophic.
Another brilliant but unwittingly implicated European brunette (who is lovelier and brainier than any American woman you’ve ever solved crimes with) joins Brown’s alter ego in Barcelona. Together they will take on another ambiguously bad Bad Guy who righteously believes he’s the Good Guy with a bizarre and tragic, though barely developed, backstory. The Bad Guy is always the operative of an even badder Bad Guy shrouded in anonymity with motives unknown until he finds out too late he was just a pawn all along.
Robert Langdon, too, is a poorly developed character, particularly as a serial lead. His traits and ticks are tacked on like an afterthought rather than fleshed out in a way that lets us get to know him. He is a professor-shaped bachelor with unimpeachable integrity and unmovable routines, but almost no personality. For five books we’ve watched Brown stack the same Jenga blocks to fashion either the man of his dreams or the man he wishes he were: The Harvard Professor supports the lesser weight of the only other traits we know: six feet tall, lanky swimmer, eidetic memory, suffers from claustrophobia, contented bachelor. That he wears a Mickey Mouse watch to “remind himself not to take life too seriously” reads more like an afterthought in Brown’s clunky attempt to humanize Langdon.
Both our protagonist and author are New England blue bloods who graduated from an exclusive boarding school. But Langdon is tall, athletic, and an international bachelor with a full head of dark hair. Brown features these details so consistently in every Robert Langdon novel it’s hard not to assume Langon is a scholarly simulacrum for Brown’s Ideal Self. Like Tolstoy’s Levin, a Wendell Berry-esque alter ego, the salt-of-the-earth farmer/philosopher who eschews the very aristocracy that makes his own life of rural leisure possible, Brown created a composite for his own so idealized he invented a profession for him: Harvard symbologist.
Like a realtor who stages a home before the open house, Brown slaps together precious few story details to fan out like brochures on an end table. The plot references the occasional generic landscape painting on an entryway wall, some empty vases on the mantel, a Harris tweed draped over the back of a dining room chair, and a woman’s Ferragamo flats kicked off by the bed. But everybody knows that nobody lives here. And no one reading this book will see themselves in this story or feel themselves living this experience through our tall, dark, and handsome hero with the same adventurous escapism of his previous novels. This is a classic case of the lights are on but no one’s home.
Everything this book lacks, however, critic Ron Charles made up for in this exasperated but hilarious Washington Post review. Because “Origin” is such a colossal disappointment, I will leave you with some literary crumbs, bullet points from Charles’ outstanding critique. And on the off-chance that you were still planning to read this book anyway: Spoiler Alert.
This time around, the requisite earth-shattering secret is a discovery made by Edmond Kirsch, a computer genius with a flair for dramatic presentations and infinite delays. Kirsch has called the world’s intelligentsia to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where he plans to reveal his findings to the world because that’s the way complex scientific discoveries are announced by quirky billionaires. (emphasis mine)
But then, when Kirsch finally quiets the crowd at the Guggenheim and begins to reveal his secret, some Roman Catholic zealot shoots him in the head. Why couldn’t it have been me? (It’s unclear if Charles wants to do the shooting or to be shot.)
For 100 pages, Brown talks like the pilot on a grounded airplane, assuring us that we’ll take off any minute now.
Brown may not have discovered a secret that threatens humanity’s faith, but he has successfully located every cliché in the world.
Darwinians, fundamentalists, atheists and believers: Pray that this cup pass from you.